Benedict Surtees

Since the General Election, assessments of the Conservative Party’s campaign have tended to centre on the party’s failure to secure a parliamentary majority. This focus isn’t especially surprising: as ConservativeHome’s own review of the campaign stressed, Conservatives enjoyed a number of advantages during the campaign that made the inconclusive result as puzzling as much as disappointing.

Nonetheless, in examining the Party’s election campaign it is important that the significant successes achieved by the Party are not obscured by the wider failure to win an outright parliamentary majority.

CCHQ’s own assessment of the election campaign has highlighted the Conservatives’ failure to make significant inroads amongst public sector workers, ethnic minorities and voters in Scotland. Despite falling short with some sections of the electorate, the party did however make significant progress amongst one vital group of voters, namely aspirant, blue-collar voters in the South and Midlands.

While the General Election saw Labour hold key Tory targets such as Hammersmith, Stirling and Bradford West, huge swings saw tougher prospects such as Cannock Chase, Dover and North West Leicestershire wrenched from Labour. That the Conservatives emerged as the largest single party after 6th May can, in large part, be put down to the Party’s success (driven by local as well as national campaigns) amongst this critical section of the electorate.

Benedict Surtees has been a Conservative Party Agent since 2008 and is currently working towards a masters degree focusing on the way in which changes in Party organisation are influencing approaches towards constituency campaigning in Britain.

Today, the decline in party membership and activism is a recurrent concern right across the political spectrum, not just in the UK but also in democratic societies throughout the world. Political parties that have existed for more than a century, as organisations sometimes boasting millions of members, now struggle to maintain organisational structures that have depended on large and active grassroots memberships. As this has happened, a growing proportion of the electorate have become genuinely disaffected with party politics, leading some to argue that we face a fundamental challenge to the health of our democracy.

Yet, while political parties struggle to sustain themselves, the appetite for political action and engagement remains very much alive. Rather than join political parties, however, many people now seek to express their ideas and values through less formal media. As a result, political parties are no longer the primary vehicles for civic participation that they once were. Increasingly, formal political parties are missing out to a verity of adaptable coalitions and interest groups, through which this civic capital is finding expression, often through effective use of new media.

In the United States, the success of groups such as MoveOn.org and the Club for Growth demonstrate how successful these third party groups can be in harnessing grassroots enthusiasm around specific issues and affecting the political debate in a way that political parties struggle to match. One of the most significant features of the Obama campaign (which paralleled aspects of the 2004 Bush campaign) was that together with its use of new technology, it worked effectively with third parties to mobilise its supporters, fundraise and even coordinate field operations in key states. Of course, there are significant differences between the party system in the US and the UK; however, the relative decline of formal political parties and the rise of popular ad-hoc coalitions, based around specific issues and causes, is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic.

So what does this mean for the future of political parties here in the UK?